Mind As a Myth

Interview by Jeffrey Mishlove

U.G. Krishnamurti is a philosopher and author of Mind is a Myth and The Mystique of Enlightenment.

Does the mind exist as a distinct entity apart from our thoughts? Sometimes thought of as an anti-guru or a reluctant sage, U.G. Krishnamurti in this interview challenges our belief that the mind is real.

JM: In your thinking, if I may call it that, you seem to suggest that the mind isn't real – that there is no mind separate from the body. Is that fair?

UG: Yes. What is there is only the body. So where is mind? If there is a mind, is it distinct from the activity of the brain? It is very difficult to deal with the question of mind. Our topic is “Mind As a Myth,” but your series is called “Thinking Allowed.” This raises a very fundamental question – what is thinking and why do we think? These questions arise from the assumption that thoughts are self-generated and spontaneous; actually, the brain is only a reactor, not a creator. For centuries we have been brainwashed to believe otherwise. It is very difficult to accept my statement that there are no thoughts at all.

JM: You seem to be taking a very materialistic and mechanistic position – that the brain is nothing more than a machine or a computer.

UG: It actually is a computer, but we are not ready to accept it. For centuries we have been made to believe that there is an entity – an I, a self, psyche, a mind, and so on. And even though most people will not hesitate to reject the fact, there really is no such thing as a soul; soul is created by the thinking of man. We have been fed on this kind of bunk for centuries, and if this diet were to be changed, we would all die of starvation.

If you do not want to think, is there thinking? Wanting and thinking go together, and thought is matter, you see; so you use thought to achieve either material or spiritual goals. Unfortunately, we place the spiritual goals on a higher level and consider ourselves very superior to those who use thought to achieve material goals. So actually, whether you call it spiritual or material, even the so-called spiritual values are materialistic. Thought is matter; thought is not a creator of thought, it is a response to stimuli. What is there is only stimulus and response. Even the fact that there is a response to the stimulus is something which we cannot experience except through the help of thought, which creates a division between stimulus and response. Actually, stimulus and response are one unitary movement. You can't even say that there is a sensation; even the so-called sensations we think we are experiencing all the time cannot be experienced by us except through the knowledge we have from the sensations.

JM: And so we infer from all of this that there is a self, that there is a mind that is mediating between the stimulus and the response.

UG: What is there is only the knowledge we have of the self, the knowledge that we have gathered, or have passed down to us, from generation to generation. Through the help of this knowledge we create what we call self, and then we experience the self as separate from the functioning of this body. So, is there such a thing as the self? Is there such a thing as I? For me the only I is the first person singular pronoun. I use “I” and “you” to make the conversation simpler; but really what we call I is simply a first person singular pronoun.

Other than that, is there any such thing as I? Is there any such thing as the self? Is there any such entity, different from the functioning of this living organism? You see, somewhere along the line of evolution – if we assume that there is such a thing as evolution – the human species experienced this self-consciousness which doesn't exist in the other species on this planet.

The whole of nature is a single unit. Man cannot separate himself from the totality of what we call nature. Unfortunately, through the help of this self-consciousness which occurred somewhere along the line, he accorded himself a superior position. He placed himself on a higher level; he treated himself, and we still continue to treat ourselves, as superior to the other species on this planet. That is the reason why we have created this disharmony; that is why we have created these tremendous ecological problems and other problems. Actually, man, or whatever you want to call him, cannot be separated from the totality of nature. That is why we have created one of the greatest blunders, and that unfortunately is the tragedy of man.

JM: But you yourself say at times that there really is no problem – that since we are part of the totality of nature, nothing really is wrong, even if we are doomed.

UG: But we are not ready to accept the fact that there is no problem. Actually, yes, there is a problem; but we have only solutions offered to us by those we consider to be in possession of truth and wisdom. Those solutions do not help us to solve the problems at all, you see. So we replace one solution with another solution. The problem is the solution, and the solution has not helped us to solve the non-existent problem. So actually, it is the solution that has created the problem, and we are not ready to throw the solution out the window, because we have tremendous confidence in those who have offered these solutions as the things that will free us from the problems that the solution has created for us.

What I am trying to suggest is that there is no such thing as your mind and my mind. For purposes of convenience, and for want of a better and more adequate word, I can use the term world mind. The world mind is the totality of man's thoughts, feelings and experiences passed down to us.

JM: The world mind?

UG: The world mind is that which has created you and me, for the main purpose of maintaining its status quo, its continuity. The world mind is self-perpetuating, and its only interest is to maintain its continuity, which it can do only through the creation of what we call individual minds – your mind and my mind. So without the help of that knowledge, you have no way of experiencing yourself as an entity. This so-called entity – the I, the self, the soul, the psyche – is created by that, and through the help of that you will be able to experience these things. And so we are caught up in this vicious circle, that the knowledge gives you the experience, and the experience strengthens and fortifies that knowledge. Is it possible for you – let alone the mind, or the entity, or the I, or the self, or the soul – to experience your body as a body, without the help of that knowledge? For example, when you look at your hand, is this hand yours? We have only the senses. The sensory perceptions do not say that this is a hand. The knowledge that we have tells us that this is a hand, and that this is your hand and not my hand.

This knowledge is put into us during the course of our life. When you play with a child, you tell him, “Show me your hand, show me your nose, show me your teeth, show me your face. What is your name?” This is how we build up the identity of the individual's relationship with his hand, with his nose, with his eyes, and with the world around.

We have to accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us. Otherwise we have no way of functioning sanely and intelligently; we will end up in the loony bin, singing merry melodies and loony tunes. So it is essential for us to accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us by culture, by society, and leave it at that, and treat it as functional in value. But it cannot help us experience the reality of anything. We assume that there is a totality of thoughts, feelings and experiences. But are there thoughts? Even that I question. There are no thoughts; what is there is only the activity about thoughts. What we call thinking is only a dialectical thinking about thinking itself. We use these non-existent thoughts to accomplish, to attain a goal; whether it is material or spiritual doesn't really matter. We need this to achieve our goals; so if you don't want a thing, there is no thinking at all. Whether you want this material goal or spiritual goal – whether you want to be an enlightened man, or a god-man, or whether you want to run away with the beautiful girl living next door to you – society may condemn such a thing, but basically the instrument which you use to achieve your goal is only through the help of thought. Otherwise any thought that is born out of that creates misery for you, because any thought that is born out of thought is destructive in its nature; it is interested in protecting itself.

Thought is a protective mechanism. It isolates you from the totality of nature, which cannot be separated from you. The difficulty is that you cannot accept that you are not separate from the totality of things, from what you call nature – that every form of life is also part of this nature. When I use the word nature, I use it in the general sense; nature means the world around you. All the species on this planet are integral parts of what we call nature; they cannot be separated from that. But unfortunately, we have succeeded in separating ourselves through our thinking, and through the help of this knowledge we continue to maintain the continuity of knowledge. That is the reason why we have invented all this integrity – becoming one with nature, and all that kind of thing. And we are not going to succeed, because we don't understand that what separates you from the totality of things is thought; and thought cannot be used to bring about an integral unity. Basically, we are all integrally united; and unfortunately, through our thinking we have separated ourselves and are acting from this point of separateness, and it is this that is responsible for the chaos in your personal life and in the world around you.

JM: Let's step back for a moment. You seem to have said that all that we know is by virtue of thought; and yet we can't even know thought itself, because every time we look at thought we don't see thought, we just see thoughts about thought.

UG: Even the thought we are talking about is created by the knowledge that is given to us. So thought is a self-perpetuating mechanism. And when I use the word self, I don't use it in the sense used by the philosophers and metaphysicians – like a self-starter.

JM: Or self-perpetuating.

UG: Yes, perpetuation – the body is not interested in that at all. The actions of the body are responses to stimuli; thought has no separate, independent existence of its own. Unfortunately, thought is what has created beginning and end; it is interested in permanence, whereas the functioning of the body is immortal in its way, because it has no beginning, it is not born, so it has no death, you see. So there is a death for thought, but not for the body.

JM: Let me try and paraphrase you; you seem to be suggesting quite a fabric of intertwined notions here. One of them is that thought tends to perpetuate itself.

UG: It does not want to come to an end.

JM: The mind doesn't exist, but even so it wishes to believe it is immortal.

UG: It is interested in creating an artificial immortality – of an entity, a soul, a self, whatever you want to call it. It knows in a way that it is coming to an end somewhere along the line, and its survival, its continuity, its status quo depends upon the continuity of the body. But the body is not in any way involved with the thought, because it has no beginning and no end. It is thought that has created the two points, birth and death.

JM: So our illusion that we have a mind is born out of fear.

UG: And so we do not want fear to come to an end, because the end of fear is the end of thought. If thought comes to an end, the body drops dead there. What is left after that is something the body does not know. For you, I am alive and not dead because you hear me responding to your questions. But there is nobody who is talking; there is only talking. It is like a tape recorder, you see; you are playing with the tape recorder for your own reasons, and whatever comes out of that is what you want to hear from this tape recorder.

JM: You seem to be taking a position almost equivalent to that of the physicists who look at matter; they look at molecules and atoms and then particles, and beneath particles at quarks, and finally they say there is really nothing there.

UG: One of these days the scientists, in their quest to find what they call the fundamental particle, will have to realize that the fundamental particle does not exist. They are not ready to accept that. One day they will come to terms with that, and accept that there is no such thing as a fundamental particle, and that there is no such thing as the Big Bang, or whatever they call it; it is an exercise in futility. They will continue to dabble with that, to find answers to the question only for the Nobel Prize.

JM: You seem to be saying that the body exists, that the brain exists, and that nature exists.

UG: But they have no beginning and no end; that is all that I am emphasizing. And since the body is not born, it has no end. It is thought that has created the body, and had established a point and says it was born here, and is going to end there. So it is thought that has created the time factor. We are caught up in the field of logical thinking; and that there is no beginning and no end is something which shatters the whole fabric, the foundation of our logical thinking. We are not ready to accept that at all.

JM: I can see how this notion of no beginning and no end might apply to time and space, but not to the body.

UG: You talk as if this body is separate from the totality of nature, or whatever you want to call it. It is thought that has created the body, a separate entity, and says that it has a beginning and an end. Thought creates space; thought creates time. It is thought that has created space and experiences space; but actually there is no such thing as space at all. What is there is a space-time-energy continuum, which has no end. You see, thought cannot conceive of the possibility of a movement without a beginning and without a point where it is going to arrive sometime. So that is the problem of thought; its actions are limited to its perpetuation, its continuity, its permanence. But if it tries to talk about anything, or to experience the body, it cannot do that, because living thought is something dead.

JM: You seem to be saying that we are trapped in the prison of our own thoughts, and this prison creates the illusion that we are separate, that we are not part of nature. And yet the prison itself is also an illusion.

UG: The prison also is created by thought, and that is why it is trying to get out of the trap it has itself created. There is a simile given in one of the scriptures in India. A dog picks up a dry bone; there is no there. And then it bites, and the bone hurts the gums, and blood comes out of them. And the dog believes – imagines, experiences, feels, whatever word you want to use – that the blood which is coming out of its own gums is from the bone. That is the kind of trap in which the whole structure of thinking is caught up; and it tries all the time to get out of the trap it has created. That is the human predicament.

Thinking Allowed, 1992